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An atmosphere of nervous excitement. I can see the frosty air coming from my competitors as they execute the "pre-race" wiggle on the starting line.

A swift movement of the hips.

I'm lined up for my local 5km community parkrun and I'm serious. The countdown begins...

Wait a second. I need to adjust my tracker. As does the guy next to me.

The person in the line expresses impatience. I'm not moving until… yes! Connection established, I'm off.

In the mele, it's hard to spot a arm without a wearable on it. And it's not just us participants who wear them.

We're witnessing a booming, multi-billion dollar market. Companies like Samsung Galaxy lead the market, each with an broad range of different versions to suit a variety of needs. According to how advanced the watch you choose, prices can start from £100 to a small fortune.

"I find it infuriating, I'm unable to stop checking."

"It reassures me… It feels like a friend supporting me."

"Stop telling me about a poor sleep."

A small sample of the responses people have shared from fellow smartwatch wearers when I inquire what they their opinion is on theirs.

The Monitoring Conundrum

My current opinion on my own device? At this moment, annoying. It's indicating I'm not hitting my target, causing me to question whether the foliage along my route are blocking my GPS connection.

Millions of us strap these compact devices onto our arms and use them constantly, ostensibly at ease with the fact they're constantly tracking us.

Long past are the days when we relied on them solely to give us an estimation of our step count. Today, they can track our sleep patterns, stress levels, oxygen saturation, our body battery.

It's difficult to find a health indicator they aren't designed to measure.

But can they do what they claim to do? And are the data points we obsess over a true reflection of our actual health? Do they boost our overall health, or do the plethora of metrics and constant notifications just contribute to our everyday anxiety?

Addiction or Aid?

"I do get a quite preoccupied with mine," an individual confesses.

While she values how her device records her runs, she finds some of its other capabilities "overwhelming" at times - a feeling first discovered during a significant period.

Prior to discovering she could adjust the settings, her smartwatch kept telling her she was being insufficiently active enough. Later on, the watch insists her she's had a bad night's sleep.

"I am caring for a six-month old, I don't need to be notified I've not slept," she says. "I know that perfectly well."

Is it not possible to just stop wearing it?

"I suppose I could, I suppose, but I've got this push-pull dynamic with it," she says. "I appreciate it for its exercise data, but I'm unsure whether all the other things it can now do is perhaps excessive for me."

Inside the Device

Different brands of smartwatch has its own novel way of measuring your vitals and analysing your data, but the most use detectors on the underside of the watch.

They typically project tiny, coloured LED lights onto your skin which can observe pulsation, detecting your heartbeat. Sophisticated devices analyse changes in the electrical current that passes over the skin to get an idea of your nervous system activity.

The Professional Viewpoint

One expert says that in general for smartwatches, it's a "difficult line" - while the rapidly advancing tech could potentially aid early diagnosis, "detecting disease before we notice anything", it could also turn us watch wearers into the "worried well".

He points out that some of the latest wearables can carry out tests like medical-grade monitoring, which continuously monitor how healthy the heart is. They can notify if someone is experiencing a heart arrhythmia, where there is erratic signals in the heart causing an arrhythmia.

This does not automatically signal someone is on the verge of a heart attack, but it can give an early warning they might be more susceptible of a stroke in the long term.

But how to make sense of these readings is not straightforward. The expert concerns that as further capabilities are introduced, people may not be able to fully contextualise their data.

"I'm not entirely convinced that having the capacity to monitor so many metrics is such a positive development," he says.

A clinical psychologist specialising in patient behaviour concurs. Her work into the impact of wearable tech on a specific group of individuals with health issues suggested a minority of those who were given devices to monitor their cardiac function experienced greater stress and were "more inclined to use healthcare resources".

She identified a cycle with her patients - they saw a concerning reading on their watch. They felt anxious. Their BPM rose. They got more worried. They checked again, and their anxiety went up again.

"When people are presented with numbers about ourselves that we lack context for then, understandably, we are going to become concerned," the psychologist says. "We check, we re-check - it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy."